Carrie Worthen and Ben Pope, Partners

Since teaming in 1995, we’ve produced graphic design works for corporate, independent and non-profit clients. Our current projects include branding/identity systems with a strong web component as well as a few fine art books. We develop database-backed websites with custom CMS implementations and have produced web-scraping data collection tools and other specialized web-based apps. Together we look for the unique voice of a project (Ben steering from the tech side and Carrie the art) and with the help of skilled assistance are always able to find it. We think design lies not only in the visual but in the unseen structures that support it, both aspects keep everybody at Thirdthing constantly searching for the simplest solutions.

In Wildness, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/11.5 × 15.5” / 120 pages

This redesign of a book (with the same title) published by the Sierra Club in the 1960s joins written observations from Thoreau during the late 1800s with the imagery of nature photographer Eliot Porter. This coupling of word and landscape, with interjections from Walden as well, have remained intact only the design has been updated. The removable title band encourages the book to remain off the shelf and out for perusal.

Virgil Village First Fridays

/Event Branding/Logo, promotional materials

A colorful logo echoes the diverse businesses of Los Angeles neighborhood Virgil Village. This charitable First Fridays series offers deals from local businesses with an eye towards growing into a monthly art and culture festival. We provided usage guidelines, responsive web layouts and templates for social media visual posts.

Melody

Painting, collage and handwritten design elements help this indoor-outdoor wine bar and event space communicate their welcoming bungalo vibe. The website is minimal and client-updatable via web browser. We designed a MailChimp program with art-making system (and another for Instagram) - giving them full artistic control over their ever-changing promotions. Program includes: Logo, Website, Social & Email Sytems, Signage.

Hayward Luxury LLC

/Retail Website/HTML5, Ruby on Rails

By making subtle layout and behavior changes we turned a basic site for this New York based luxury handbag brand into a more sophisticated expression of their style. The new site is more legible and user friendly, its fluidly hiding navigation area, animated transitions, clarified ecommerce and mobile device scaling more aptly suit the brand and their finely-crafted products.

Sketchbook Skool

Online video art classes taught by illustrators from around the world in a fun community environment open to all ability levels. We created a bright palette and handwritten “ink drip” logo to support the variety of artwork styles. We develop and manage Facebook advertising campaigns around new kourse releases. The browser-based backend is client managed.

Very Special Flowers

West Village florist VSF serves up floral arrangements for New York fashion, corporate and individual customers. Their existing stencil flower logo reworked into a secondary, asterisk-style mark. The updated logo is paired with an equally simple site that features faint photographic movement and buttons that slide the layout to snapshot and ordering areas. The client manages changes through a browser-based interface to the backend database.

Daniel Lee for Culver City Council

/Political Branding/Logo, Signage, Poster, Direct Mail

For social justice activist Daniel Lee we used environmental green to set him apart from the red/white and blueness of typical campaigns. Bold logo and consistent color blocking on a range of materials made his a winning effort in a hotly contested, large market local race.

Christina Karras

Branding and web presence for interior designer Christina Karras. The portfolio style site uses full window photography to pull you into her luxurious environments. The logo is presented quietly, tone-on-tone built from loose crosshatching hinting at her custom work with textiles and a display font mirroring her darker punk leanings. Browser-based admin interface.

RAND Methods Centers

Global Research Talent, a unit within the RAND Corporation, wanted a sub-brand that could work with and be faithful to their corporate branding. A color is assigned to each of the 6 groups that make up the “Methods Centers,” which is then elaborated into triangular abstracts, isolations or voids. The result communicates the individual and cooperative efforts by and between the groups, and their role within the much larger entirety of RAND’s research work.

The Blue Fist

We volunteered the design of a symbol for the Wisconsin AFL-CIO in their fight against the anti-union actions of their tea party governor. It shows Wisconsin as a revolutionary raised fist in Democratic blue, surrounded by an expanse of Republican red with Madison as a white star. The colors are bright, the lines jagged and bold keeping the message positive. The fist evolved from “Wisconsin-state-shaped” to a standard solidarity fist for CWA New Jersey.

James Lawson Institute

/Non-Profit Branding/Logo, Advertising, Socials, Web Template

During the Civil Rights Movement, James Lawson advised Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his inner circle on stategies of non-violent resistance. Today he holds yearly 4-day intensive training sessions for experienced activists on the techniques used by Ghandi and Dr. King. We established a logo and identity, ad and social templates, and modified a Wordpress theme they could use on their own.

Tristam Steinberg

A photo-centric site for an interior, set and production design firm. Organized around individual horizontally-sliding image collections for each project that the user manipulates, clicking on individual photos to enlarge. The image-slide of the projects is swipe-friendly on devices. Simple browser-based database backend for client management.

Vanessa Gezari

This site allows journalist and Columbia University professor Vanessa Gezari to maintain a publicly accessible archive of her work. The database backend lets the article list have multilevel keywords, tags and sorts. The site contains an excerpt of her new book The Tender Soldier, as well as links to purchase and speaking engagement announcements. She manages web-collected mailing list information with Mail Chimp. The site scales seamlessly to idevices.

Proud too be Weirrd, AMMO Books

This large format visual compendium of Ralph Steadman’s life as a cartoonist is also packed with his own abstract, irreverent prose. He wanted the book’s typographic layout to be as varied and loose as his art, and free from any traditional grid structure or inhibiting design rules. A limited edition of 1,000 signed, clothbound books have splatter book-block egdes and include a fine art print. The standard edition is the same size, but unsigned with plain page-edges and paper-wraped coverboard.

Louie and Chan

/Restaurant Branding and Web/Logo, Web, Stationery, etc.

Sitting between the neighborhoods of Little Italy and Chinatown this Manhattan restaurant and nightclub embraces a 1930s aesthetic. The graphic identity supports an era-specific story of friendship and cultural merging in the time of the discreet speakeasy—Chan inspiring the downstairs cocktail lounge and Louie the street level Italian restaurant and adjoining private dining room. The website features a custom reservation system for the private dining room.

Surround View

Logo and branding for startup that provides 360 degree interactive panoramas of interiors (and exteriors) for real estate and commercial builders. Gradations of isometric walls form the logo, a nod to the architecture-driven nature of their business. This sales site is bold and promotional, it serves to share the portfolio panorama tours and give prospective clients an idea of the production process and options.

Locals Only, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/11.5 × 15.5” / 84 pages

An oversize format emphasizes intimate close-ups and sweeping action shots in this collection by Hugh Holland. This slice of mid-seventies Americana is filled with counterculture teenage skateboarders practicing their craft in the vacant pools, beaches, streets and playgrounds of Southern California. It includes 120 large format images, translations and a Q&A with the artist.

Rebecca Adler Photo

With always-visible navigation and large imagery Rebecca Adler uses her website an an immersive slideshow to showcase her collection of lifestyle and music-focused projects. Her collections are paired down letting her style come through. The layout scales on the fly as you change the size of the browser window. The blog is a scroller with visual connections to the main site. As usual it is database backended and user-friendly to the client.

RAND Labor & Population

/Collateral Materials/Booklet & Brochures / 7 x 7” / 6c Offset

Labor & Population (L&P) is a division within the RAND Corporation that assists governments worldwide with social policy matters by providing economic research and analysis. These brochures and booklets serve as “leave-behinds” after one-on-one meetings with clients. Working within corporate guidelines to design a cohesive brand for the department we created a system that was then applied to a series of brochures for many of the individual centers within L&P.

Jackie Boudreau Kinsey

Starting with a full screen blast of closeup texture, this portfolio site uses the square logotype area to house the navigation so that the visual field is kept clean, spare and white like the walls of a museum. Simple captioning and slideshow play button are the only other things on the page. The artist is able to upload new imagery and text through the simple, browser-based, backened interface.

Edward Weston 125, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/14 x 14" / 262 pages

In honor of his 125th birthday this collection from the Edward Weston archive covers his black and white era. The book pairs entries from Weston’s logbook with the referenced images. The oversize limited/first edition of 2,000 has a black paper cover and comes inside a gold cloth slipcase. The popular version of the first edition is 9.75” square with a white cloth cover.

In Wildness, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/11.5 × 15.5” / 120 pages

This redesign of a book (with the same title) published by the Sierra Club in the 1960s joins written observations from Thoreau during the late 1800s with the imagery of nature photographer Eliot Porter. This coupling of word and landscape, with interjections from Walden as well, have remained intact only the design has been updated. The removable title band encourages the book to remain off the shelf and out for perusal.

Do The Right Thing, AMMO Books

/Feature Film Monograph/12 × 8.5” / 360 pages

Spike Lee and Jason Matloff of the Los Angeles Times present an insider’s view into the making-of this modern film classic. It includes an in-depth interview with dozens of the film’s production and on-screen talent and presents candid production stills by David Lee. The entire film is retold through high-resolution frame grabs and features the complete original script handwritten by the director.

Sam Gezari

As a cinematographer who gravitates towards fine art photography Sam Gezari wanted a clean, minimal environment to house his collection of both still and video projects. His goals were quietness, a museum-like environment, large imagery and a hideable navigation area. Individual items of each section have unique URLs for easier linking. As with our other sites the interface for uploading new material is client-frienly and browser-based.

America, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/11 × 8” / 192 pages

Philadelphia-based documentary photographer Zoe Strauss captures the realities of average Americans. Though the situations are often bleak, her style and artistic voice tell a brighter more optimistic story. Zoe maintains friendships with the people she has met and in this compilation she shares both poignant personal experiences and informal email exchanges with her subjects.

The Contact Sheet, AMMO Books

/Photography Anthology/8 × 10” / 192 pages

A collection of iconic photographs from celebrated photographers is shown alongside outtakes and rejected frames from each session. These contact sheets with accompanying backstory from each artist help reveal the artistic process behind creating each these 40 famous works. The first edition is hardcover with an acetate dust jacket and features work by Elliott Erwitt on the cover, the second edition is softcover with full-width cover foldback, Alex Praeger is featured. Both include French, Spanish and German translations.

Tska Tska

This paired-down site uses an expandable center window to house imagery for each section. The site is scalable with the changing aspect ratio of the browser window, as well as idevices. The client updates via browser-based interface. The site was designed to allow for a build-out into ecommerce sales. We did extensive brand consultation and designed the logo applications to stationery, linesheet, hangtags and labels.

Jazzlife, Taschen

/Photography Monograph/11.8 × 16.5” / 720 pages

Musicologist Joachim Berendt and photographer William Claxton hooked up in 1960 to tour the great jazz cities of America. This oversize edition (that includes CD) captures the audio, images and personal tales of the artists who devoted their lives to this great American art form. We worked alongside Bill and his wife Peggy Moffit to create what was a truly fitting legacy piece for his photographic life. Translations are included thoughout.

The Polaroid Book, Taschen

/Photography Anthology/7.2 × 8.8” / 352 pages

During their heyday in the mid 20th century the Polaroid Corporation encouraged artists to experiment with the new products and formats in development. Over the years the company amassed an extensive archive of fine art works from an array of recognizable names­—these works are presented here with a nod to the company’s graphic design past and foil packaged like their professional pack-film.

Steve McQueen, Taschen

/Photography Monograph/8 × 9.9” / 192 pages

William Claxton’s visual recount of his days spent hanging out with the actor as both friend and subject. These candid shots show McQueen on-set, on location, at home, or at play during off-hours. The collection spins your typical view of this movie icon as easygoing cool guy, you can see just beneath the surface a man who can too easily get lost in either intense earnestness or mischievous silliness. Includes translations.

Carrie Worthen and Ben Pope, Partners

Since teaming in 1995, we’ve produced graphic design works for corporate, independent and non-profit clients. Our current projects include branding/identity systems with a strong web component as well as a few fine art books. We develop database-backed websites with custom CMS implementations and have produced web-scraping data collection tools and other specialized web-based apps. Together we look for the unique voice of a project (Ben steering from the tech side and Carrie the art) and with the help of skilled assistance are always able to find it. We think design lies not only in the visual but in the unseen structures that support it, both aspects keep everybody at Thirdthing constantly searching for the simplest solutions.

Web and Branding

Virgil Village First Fridays

/Event Branding/Logo, promotional materials

A colorful logo echoes the diverse businesses of Los Angeles neighborhood Virgil Village. This charitable First Fridays series offers deals from local businesses with an eye towards growing into a monthly art and culture festival. We provided usage guidelines, responsive web layouts and templates for social media visual posts.

Melody

Painting, collage and handwritten design elements help this indoor-outdoor wine bar and event space communicate their welcoming bungalo vibe. The website is minimal and client-updatable via web browser. We designed a MailChimp program with art-making system (and another for Instagram) - giving them full artistic control over their ever-changing promotions. Program includes: Logo, Website, Social & Email Sytems, Signage.

Hayward Luxury LLC

/Retail Website/HTML5, Ruby on Rails

By making subtle layout and behavior changes we turned a basic site for this New York based luxury handbag brand into a more sophisticated expression of their style. The new site is more legible and user friendly, its fluidly hiding navigation area, animated transitions, clarified ecommerce and mobile device scaling more aptly suit the brand and their finely-crafted products.

Sketchbook Skool

Online video art classes taught by illustrators from around the world in a fun community environment open to all ability levels. We created a bright palette and handwritten “ink drip” logo to support the variety of artwork styles. We develop and manage Facebook advertising campaigns around new kourse releases. The browser-based backend is client managed.

Very Special Flowers

West Village florist VSF serves up floral arrangements for New York fashion, corporate and individual customers. Their existing stencil flower logo reworked into a secondary, asterisk-style mark. The updated logo is paired with an equally simple site that features faint photographic movement and buttons that slide the layout to snapshot and ordering areas. The client manages changes through a browser-based interface to the backend database.

Daniel Lee for Culver City Council

/Political Branding/Logo, Signage, Poster, Direct Mail

For social justice activist Daniel Lee we used environmental green to set him apart from the red/white and blueness of typical campaigns. Bold logo and consistent color blocking on a range of materials made his a winning effort in a hotly contested, large market local race.

Christina Karras

Branding and web presence for interior designer Christina Karras. The portfolio style site uses full window photography to pull you into her luxurious environments. The logo is presented quietly, tone-on-tone built from loose crosshatching hinting at her custom work with textiles and a display font mirroring her darker punk leanings. Browser-based admin interface.

RAND Methods Centers

Global Research Talent, a unit within the RAND Corporation, wanted a sub-brand that could work with and be faithful to their corporate branding. A color is assigned to each of the 6 groups that make up the “Methods Centers,” which is then elaborated into triangular abstracts, isolations or voids. The result communicates the individual and cooperative efforts by and between the groups, and their role within the much larger entirety of RAND’s research work.

The Blue Fist

We volunteered the design of a symbol for the Wisconsin AFL-CIO in their fight against the anti-union actions of their tea party governor. It shows Wisconsin as a revolutionary raised fist in Democratic blue, surrounded by an expanse of Republican red with Madison as a white star. The colors are bright, the lines jagged and bold keeping the message positive. The fist evolved from “Wisconsin-state-shaped” to a standard solidarity fist for CWA New Jersey.

James Lawson Institute

/Non-Profit Branding/Logo, Advertising, Socials, Web Template

During the Civil Rights Movement, James Lawson advised Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his inner circle on stategies of non-violent resistance. Today he holds yearly 4-day intensive training sessions for experienced activists on the techniques used by Ghandi and Dr. King. We established a logo and identity, ad and social templates, and modified a Wordpress theme they could use on their own.

Tristam Steinberg

A photo-centric site for an interior, set and production design firm. Organized around individual horizontally-sliding image collections for each project that the user manipulates, clicking on individual photos to enlarge. The image-slide of the projects is swipe-friendly on devices. Simple browser-based database backend for client management.

Vanessa Gezari

This site allows journalist and Columbia University professor Vanessa Gezari to maintain a publicly accessible archive of her work. The database backend lets the article list have multilevel keywords, tags and sorts. The site contains an excerpt of her new book The Tender Soldier, as well as links to purchase and speaking engagement announcements. She manages web-collected mailing list information with Mail Chimp. The site scales seamlessly to idevices.

Louie and Chan

/Restaurant Branding and Web/Logo, Web, Stationery, etc.

Sitting between the neighborhoods of Little Italy and Chinatown this Manhattan restaurant and nightclub embraces a 1930s aesthetic. The graphic identity supports an era-specific story of friendship and cultural merging in the time of the discreet speakeasy—Chan inspiring the downstairs cocktail lounge and Louie the street level Italian restaurant and adjoining private dining room. The website features a custom reservation system for the private dining room.

Surround View

Logo and branding for startup that provides 360 degree interactive panoramas of interiors (and exteriors) for real estate and commercial builders. Gradations of isometric walls form the logo, a nod to the architecture-driven nature of their business. This sales site is bold and promotional, it serves to share the portfolio panorama tours and give prospective clients an idea of the production process and options.

Rebecca Adler Photo

With always-visible navigation and large imagery Rebecca Adler uses her website an an immersive slideshow to showcase her collection of lifestyle and music-focused projects. Her collections are paired down letting her style come through. The layout scales on the fly as you change the size of the browser window. The blog is a scroller with visual connections to the main site. As usual it is database backended and user-friendly to the client.

RAND Labor & Population

/Collateral Materials/Booklet & Brochures / 7 x 7” / 6c Offset

Labor & Population (L&P) is a division within the RAND Corporation that assists governments worldwide with social policy matters by providing economic research and analysis. These brochures and booklets serve as “leave-behinds” after one-on-one meetings with clients. Working within corporate guidelines to design a cohesive brand for the department we created a system that was then applied to a series of brochures for many of the individual centers within L&P.

Jackie Boudreau Kinsey

Starting with a full screen blast of closeup texture, this portfolio site uses the square logotype area to house the navigation so that the visual field is kept clean, spare and white like the walls of a museum. Simple captioning and slideshow play button are the only other things on the page. The artist is able to upload new imagery and text through the simple, browser-based, backened interface.

Sam Gezari

As a cinematographer who gravitates towards fine art photography Sam Gezari wanted a clean, minimal environment to house his collection of both still and video projects. His goals were quietness, a museum-like environment, large imagery and a hideable navigation area. Individual items of each section have unique URLs for easier linking. As with our other sites the interface for uploading new material is client-frienly and browser-based.

Tska Tska

This paired-down site uses an expandable center window to house imagery for each section. The site is scalable with the changing aspect ratio of the browser window, as well as idevices. The client updates via browser-based interface. The site was designed to allow for a build-out into ecommerce sales. We did extensive brand consultation and designed the logo applications to stationery, linesheet, hangtags and labels.

Book Design

Proud too be Weirrd, AMMO Books

This large format visual compendium of Ralph Steadman’s life as a cartoonist is also packed with his own abstract, irreverent prose. He wanted the book’s typographic layout to be as varied and loose as his art, and free from any traditional grid structure or inhibiting design rules. A limited edition of 1,000 signed, clothbound books have splatter book-block egdes and include a fine art print. The standard edition is the same size, but unsigned with plain page-edges and paper-wraped coverboard.

Locals Only, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/11.5 × 15.5” / 84 pages

An oversize format emphasizes intimate close-ups and sweeping action shots in this collection by Hugh Holland. This slice of mid-seventies Americana is filled with counterculture teenage skateboarders practicing their craft in the vacant pools, beaches, streets and playgrounds of Southern California. It includes 120 large format images, translations and a Q&A with the artist.

Edward Weston 125, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/14 x 14" / 262 pages

In honor of his 125th birthday this collection from the Edward Weston archive covers his black and white era. The book pairs entries from Weston’s logbook with the referenced images. The oversize limited/first edition of 2,000 has a black paper cover and comes inside a gold cloth slipcase. The popular version of the first edition is 9.75” square with a white cloth cover.

In Wildness, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/11.5 × 15.5” / 120 pages

This redesign of a book (with the same title) published by the Sierra Club in the 1960s joins written observations from Thoreau during the late 1800s with the imagery of nature photographer Eliot Porter. This coupling of word and landscape, with interjections from Walden as well, have remained intact only the design has been updated. The removable title band encourages the book to remain off the shelf and out for perusal.

Do The Right Thing, AMMO Books

/Feature Film Monograph/12 × 8.5” / 360 pages

Spike Lee and Jason Matloff of the Los Angeles Times present an insider’s view into the making-of this modern film classic. It includes an in-depth interview with dozens of the film’s production and on-screen talent and presents candid production stills by David Lee. The entire film is retold through high-resolution frame grabs and features the complete original script handwritten by the director.

America, AMMO Books

/Photography Monograph/11 × 8” / 192 pages

Philadelphia-based documentary photographer Zoe Strauss captures the realities of average Americans. Though the situations are often bleak, her style and artistic voice tell a brighter more optimistic story. Zoe maintains friendships with the people she has met and in this compilation she shares both poignant personal experiences and informal email exchanges with her subjects.

The Contact Sheet, AMMO Books

/Photography Anthology/8 × 10” / 192 pages

A collection of iconic photographs from celebrated photographers is shown alongside outtakes and rejected frames from each session. These contact sheets with accompanying backstory from each artist help reveal the artistic process behind creating each these 40 famous works. The first edition is hardcover with an acetate dust jacket and features work by Elliott Erwitt on the cover, the second edition is softcover with full-width cover foldback, Alex Praeger is featured. Both include French, Spanish and German translations.

Jazzlife, Taschen

/Photography Monograph/11.8 × 16.5” / 720 pages

Musicologist Joachim Berendt and photographer William Claxton hooked up in 1960 to tour the great jazz cities of America. This oversize edition (that includes CD) captures the audio, images and personal tales of the artists who devoted their lives to this great American art form. We worked alongside Bill and his wife Peggy Moffit to create what was a truly fitting legacy piece for his photographic life. Translations are included thoughout.

The Polaroid Book, Taschen

/Photography Anthology/7.2 × 8.8” / 352 pages

During their heyday in the mid 20th century the Polaroid Corporation encouraged artists to experiment with the new products and formats in development. Over the years the company amassed an extensive archive of fine art works from an array of recognizable names­—these works are presented here with a nod to the company’s graphic design past and foil packaged like their professional pack-film.

Steve McQueen, Taschen

/Photography Monograph/8 × 9.9” / 192 pages

William Claxton’s visual recount of his days spent hanging out with the actor as both friend and subject. These candid shots show McQueen on-set, on location, at home, or at play during off-hours. The collection spins your typical view of this movie icon as easygoing cool guy, you can see just beneath the surface a man who can too easily get lost in either intense earnestness or mischievous silliness. Includes translations.

Carrie Worthen and Ben Pope, Partners

Since teaming in 1995, we’ve produced graphic design works for corporate, independent and non-profit clients. Our current projects include branding/identity systems with a strong web component as well as a few fine art books. We develop database-backed websites with custom CMS implementations and have produced web-scraping data collection tools and other specialized web-based apps. Together we look for the unique voice of a project (Ben steering from the tech side and Carrie the art) and with the help of skilled assistance are always able to find it. We think design lies not only in the visual but in the unseen structures that support it, both aspects keep everybody at Thirdthing constantly searching for the simplest solutions.